Thursday, October 9, 2014

Dracula Untold

I really did bust out laughing in the theater. This movie is absolutely a hot mess, and there was so much nonsense floating around in it that it was actually hilariously bad. I don't even know where to begin.

Alright, so the plot of the movie is that to prevent his son from being conscripted into the Turkish army, Vlad the Impaler makes a deal with a vampire that he can have super vampire powers as long as he can avoid drinking blood for three days, after which he'll revert back to regular stupid human Vlad.

As I was watching this movie, I keep thinking about ways the plot could be fixed to have the movie make sense. There was so much illogical nonsense and outright cringeworthy scenes in the plot that I think it was beyond repair. (By the way, if you ever find yourself with super vampire powers and fighting a land war against a Turkish general, you fly your ass to his house in the middle of the night, stab him rel gud, and that's it. Land war over.)

There's so much shit in this movie that doesn't even make sense, I don't know where to begin...One of the most hilarious bad scenes in this movie is when the Turkish soldiers get wind of Vlad's wacky voodoo and start getting scared of him. So, for the next battle, the general blindfolds all of the soldiers before sending them into the next battle. Because yeah, that'll put their minds at ease.

In the same battle, the general places a decoy wearing his armor in the ranks, while the actual general is...wearing a foot soldier's armor and marching in the vanguard. What? That is the least safe spot dude. Seriously, look at this in the trailer and tell me that being a foot soldier is a good idea: http://youtu.be/_2aWqecTTuE?t=2m5s. Just stay home, bro.

Ok, last one: At the end of the movie, when Dracula is 600 years old, his wife reincarnates in modern-day Romania and he runs into her on the street. He quotes their wedding vows to her and she says, "That's my favorite poem." I really did burst out laughing. Your favorite poem is somebody's weddings vows from 15th century Transylvania? How many PhDs in Romanian poetry do you have to have to be able to recognize that while hearing it randomly on the street? Congrats on reincarnating as a fucking genius, I guess.

Alright, so the events in the plot don't make any goddamn sense and are laughably stupid, but a movie can still be saved if it attempts to make a thematic statement. The movie dips its toe into many a thematic bathtub, but fails to step into any of them. He does make a pretty big sacrifice for the sake of his son, at the expense of bringing his country to war and turning into mecha-Dracula, but these ideas don't go anywhere. So...what the fuck, movie?

As I was sitting in the theater watching this and trying to think of an easy way to fix it, I realize that it really only needed one thing: to be cooler. Hear me out. The plot failings just keep piling on, and the movie doesn't even know what it wants to say, but maybe, just maybe, it were a good enough "mindless action" movie, it could be at least redeemable. There are hints of it, actually. You can see in the trailer where he controls a bunch of bats and uses them to slam into the ground so hard that they blow up the enemy army. And yeah, ok, bats are mostly just meat and bone, and can't really do that no matter how many of them they are and how hard you chuck them at the ground, but that's still pretty cool.

A good example of how this movie gets close to being cool enough is with Vlad's ability to turn into bats a moment's notice. There's a fight scene somewhat early on where he's moving around a battlefield really fast, changing into bats as he comes up behind people for stabbing. This scene should have been, first of all, shot much better, because I couldn't tell what the fuck was going on most of the time, and they use this trick where we see Vlad fighting in the reflection of a soldier's sword as he's dying and I don't even know what the actual fuck.

This scene should have been one guy wrecking face ala Dynasty Warriors (http://youtu.be/JPZmop64PtY) and it should have just been the entire movie. Dracula Untold is actually kinda good if you want something to laugh at while drunk with your friends when you're bored, but besides that, please do not pay money to see this in the theaters.

1) Well made? - The acting is not the worst, everything else is.2) Contributed? -Someday this will contribute to a bundle package sold at Wal-Mart for $5 along with Van Helsing and I, Frankenstein3) Good time? - During, like, 30 seconds of bat murder4) Watch again? - Not without a lot of booze5) Worth it? - Not even6) Who should watch this? - People trying to win a bet?